The greatest race in the Olympics is the simplest. Eight runners, eight straight lines. A bang, an explosion of muscle and, less than ten seconds later, a winner. And all they do is run. No bikes, boats, vaults or horses – just one foot in front of the other. Yet, in those three dozen blinks of an eye, sprinters in the 100m perform physical feats so advanced that scientists are still trying to understand them.
“On one level you’d think we would have pieced it together a long time ago,” says Peter Weyand, one of the world’s leading students of running and professor of applied physiology and biomechanics at the South Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. “Newton figured out the laws of motion centuries ago but when we when we apply them to the human body it gets really complex, really quickly.”
Simply analysing the extreme motion and exertions of a sprinter is challenging. Weyand and his team have a large treadmill in their lab capable of rolling at 90mph. In the punishing max test, athletes straddle the moving belt and hop on for a few seconds at a time. They start slow, with rests in between. “We increase the speed until the athlete can’t maintain it,” the professor says. “We need eight steps without moving backwards for a good trial.”
The tests are a safer version of jumping off the back of an old Routemaster bus and staying upright for eight paces – athletes wear harnesses in case they trip – but how fast is the bus going? “The unofficial record on our treadmill is 11.72 metres per second,” Weyand says. That’s 26.7mph, or not far off a city speed limit, or Bolt’s peak speed during his 2009 world record run of 27.8mph. “When we have elite athletes do the test, the whole office comes over to watch.”
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